Big Feelings

“Feelings are good,” a vocoder-soaked John Mitchell tells us at the beginning of Lonely Robot’s fourth album. The sentiment of this album’s title, and its opening title track, could not have come at a more appropriate time, as in 2020 people all around the world find themselves awash in a sea of myriad feelings, considering everything happening in the world these days. And, as much as 2020 feels like we should get a “do-over” or a mulligan on this entire year so far, as if these past six or seven months were just some cruel joke, somehow time marches ever onward; in the music world, it has suddenly been nearly a year-and-a-half since Lonely Robot‘s most recent album, “Under Stars”. In the world of John Mitchell, one of the most prolific song-crafters in all of progressive music, that might as well be an eternity…

“Honesty, heartbreak, love, lust, elation: Those concepts are in a lot of music that I love, but it's just never been something I've attempted on my own records,” DJ-turned-superproducer Mark Ronson tells Apple Music about the genesis of his fifth album. “When I dip into other people's worlds—whether it's Queens of the Stone Age or Gaga, whoever—that's when I get to work on deep s**t, but my own records should just be either record collector-y or for the dance floor.” But on the heels of a breakup, Ronson rallied a typically star-studded cast of collaborators, including Miley Cyrus, Lykke Li, and Alicia Keys, for sessions in New York and Los Angeles that plumbed personal topics previous albums would have danced right past. “It was the first time I couldn't really hide behind a concept,” he says. “It was like, 'No, no, you have to put yourself into the music this time.'” Here Ronson puts himself into telling the stories behind each track on Late Night Feelings.